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Environment and Planning A2014, volume 46, pages 20552064

doi:10.1068/a140292e

Guest editorial

Performing environmental change: the politics of social science methods


Introduction

Social sciencesfrom behavioural economics to social psychologyare increasingly


enrolled in policy, market, and activist endeavours in the area of environmental change.
In fields as diverse as sustainable architecture and lifecycle management, social scientific
expertise is gaining recognition as a contributor of models, methods, and devices for
addressing environmental issues by intervening in practices and shifting arrangements,
and in both popular and professional literatures social science is now frequently presented
as a critical resource for the measurement, prediction, and facilitation of technological,
ecological, societal, and organizational change. The lifestyle magazine SEED summarized
it succinctly in a lead article on how social science can help save us from climate change,
provocatively entitled The last experiment: It is up to social science to make us act in
environmentally conscious ways (Zax, 2009). At first sight, this situation seems to disturb
a familiar assumption in social studies of the environment: namely, the idea that the social
sciences play a rather marginal role in the policy and research area of the environment,
which has after all long been dominated by the hard sciences (Wynne, 2010). Can we
begin to assume that the relevance of social science approaches to environmental change is
becoming established, and that the period of the marginalization of social science and social
aspects in environmental issues is coming to an end?
This theme issue finds its starting point in the realization that the very posing of this
question renders newly relevant a set of political, epistemic, and ethical issues that are peculiar
to the social sciences. Various general concerns regarding the capacities of social methods to
intervene in the world now take on special salience in relation to the area of environmental
change in particular. Especially important here is the long-standing debate about the limits
and potential of the social sciences capacity to actively inform, facilitate, and help manage
social change, and also the debate about the roles that social methods and techniques of
measurement, modelling, visualization, and prediction play and might play in the performance
of change. The coining and development of the sociological concept of the performativityof
methods has been one of the principal recent contributions of the interdisciplinary field
of the social studies of science and technology (STS) to this debate (Law, 2004; Muniesa
etal, 2007). For several years now it has been recognized that this concept is of special
relevance to the field of environmental studies (Verran, 2012; Whatmore and Landstrom,
2011). In relation to environmental issues, the capacity of methods to bothinform and affect
the constitution of the phenomena purported to be measured or described raises a set of
distinctive questions both in relation to the long-established claim about the limited influence
of social science in this area, as well as in view of the heterogeneous and lively character
of environmental affairs (Latour, 2004; Marres, 2012; Murphy, 2006; Yusoff , 2013): issues
like air pollution, plastic bags, floods, climate change, domestic energy use are marked by
Many of these papers were first presented during the workshop: Performing Environmental Change:
The Politics of Social Scientific Methods, which took place at the University of Oslo in May 2010.The
theme was also the topic of a plenary session of the Nordic Conference of Environmental Social
Science in Stockholm in June 2011. The theme issue is part of ongoing collaborations between the
STSenvironment Group at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture (TIK) at the University
of Oslo and the Centre for the study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP), at Goldsmiths,
Universityof London.

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dynamics that cut across nature, technology, aesthetics, publicity, medicine, sociality, and so
on, raising the question of whether an appreciation of this circumstance allows for a different
understanding of what constitutes environmental change.
Recent work in STS has focused on the performativity of economic methods and financial
techniques in particular, and insofar as this is so it should be noted here that it is most
emphatically not only the science of economics, but equally those of psychology, geography,
organizational studies, and sociology that are invoked as part of policy and design processes
in relation to the environment and sustainability today. As such, indeed, environmental
change also offers an intriguing area for exploring the recalibration of various scientific
hierarchies in times of change, as well as to reexamine the case for a performative conception
of social science methods including but certainly not limited to economics. However, to
grasp the issues at stake here, both intellectually and politically, we feel it is important to take
a step back and first consider the problematics associated with social science approaches to
environmental change from a wider angle.
While it may be true that social scientific approaches to environmental change are
increasingly prominent, some major problems have arisen in relation to the capacity of their
methods to help take the environment into account as part of social life and effect change.
Various methods and technologies for integrating environmental concerns into everyday
practices, infrastructures, and wider societal processes have acquired a starkly problematic
status in public and political life. This notably includes some of the very devices of
environmental change to which scholars writing from a performative perspective have
directed empirical attention: the European Emission Trading Scheme, smart grid technology,
sustainable housing, and the critical load approach (Asdal, 2008a; Callon, 2009; Marres,
2013; Shick and Winthereik, 2013).
In each of these cases, social science theories and methods (eg, the design of stakeholdermarkets; the facilitation and measurement of behaviour change) have been put forward as
devices that take part in shaping the world and, in each case, their contribution has been subject
to critical scrutiny and decried as wittingly or unwittingly contributing to the making of a
surveillance society, the commodification of nature, the subsumption of political participation
by an individualistic culture of consumption, and so on. We would like to suggest here that
it is not only important for social scientistsincluding those of a performative bendto
appreciate this problematization of social methods and approaches as worthy of reflection in
and of itself. But also that this provides an interesting opportunity to reconsider and provide
a reorientation to ongoing efforts to render social studies of science and technology and
environmental studies mutually relevant.
How to take nature into account? Contributions between STS and environmental studies

One of the notable ways in which the mutual relevance of environmental studies and STS
has been established is through the concept of hybridity (Braun and Castree, 1998; Castree,
2003; Whatmore, 2002). In the last ten years or so, environmental studies have drawn on
STS in order to elaborate the claim that nature and society are inextricably entwined: the
externality of nature to society has been shown to constitute a fiction. This claim is not
only an epistemic one but also has political and ethical import: in order to articulate more
durable ways for environmental concerns to be addressed, the argument goes, we have
to begin by acknowledging that environmental entities say a rare species of snail, or
a riverdo not exist separately from social onessuch as religious rituals or industrial
standardsbut are always-already entangled with such entities and practices. We would
certainly not want to dismantle the basic argument, but it is nevertheless striking that recent
programmes of environmental change appeal to almost the opposite intuition: proliferating
sustainability initiatives and wider endeavours to take the environment into account start

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from the assumption that nature continues to be left out, or remains absent from social
practices and processes. Within this broader context, it seems to us, the assumption that the
entanglement of natural and social is already accomplishedas the proposition of hybridity
suggestscarries with it certain risks, including the risk that we may miss out on important
empirical and analytical work. Indeed, it may be rendered problematic in this context.
Assuming a more agnostic position regarding the relation between nature and society,
we might observe that it requires a lot of work to insert nature or environmental issues
as a relevant concern into social and political practices and institutional processes (Asdal,
2008a), and that these efforts frequently fail: from the highly imperfect pollution standards
designed to protect public health (Murphy, 2006) to the carbon labels supposedly developed
to insert climate change as a consideration into shopping practices (Moor and Lury, 2011)
and the problematic recycling standards established for plastic bottles (Hawkins, 2011). The
proposition that supposedly natural entities are actually hybrids, then, should not lead us to
assume that nature (or naturessee below) or the environment are already being taken into
account in social practices. All too often, attempts to produce more durable relations between
environmental and social entities and practices do not come to fruition, and in this specific
sense their entanglement cannot be taken for granted. In at least some respects, then, entities
carrying the label nature here are all too often left out of the equation. In the above cases
at least, it would be a mistake to assume that the externality of nature can be suspended,
on the sole grounds of its metaphysical or ontological implausability: in empirical practice it
takes a lot of work to establish relations between environmental entities and social practices
or assemblagesand this recognition obliges us to trace by analytical and empirical means
the different aspects or tastes of nature that might be left by the wayside in projects to take
the environment into accountfor instance, in accounting practices.
This seems especially crucial to us, insofar as, theoretically and historically speaking, social
science has actively contributed to this situation in which it has become possible to practice
environmental accounting without actually taking nature or natures into account, and to continue
to ignore their relevance to the constitution of social practice (Hinchliffe, 2001; Latour, 2004;
see also Whatmore and Landstrom, 2011). However, this circumstance does not necessarily
need to be framed as an eitheror situation: we want to stress the importance of specificity and
of tracing how particular environmental entities are taken into account, or articulated to this
purpose, and how nature-objects and environmental issues might be modified or transformed as
part of trajectories and practices of accountability (Asdal, 2011; Neyland and Woolgar, 2013;
Verran, 2012). In exploring such modifications empirically, we might then come to realize that
nature or the environment has, at least sometimes, been left out of the equation. In efforts to
render social studies of science and technology and environmental studies mutually relevant,
we then suggest that we examine not only the hybrid character of environmental phenomena
and the role of social science methods in enabling the explication of the entanglements of
the natural and the social, but also the ways in which both environmental and social entities
and practices come to be modified in ostensible efforts to establish more durable relations
between them, and the limits, failures, and issues becoming apparent in this process.
One notable example we have discussed in other work is everyday and policy applications
of carbon accounting (Marres, 2011). In practice, carbon accounting often involves the use of
conversion charts: one megawatt of energy is translated into a given amount of CO2 emissions
using a nominal conversion table. As a consequence, such practices do not necessarily take
into account the environmental particulars of energy production, supply, and demand, nor the
actual arrangements and processes in play in the particular situation under scrutiny (on this
point see also MacKenzie, 2009). To be sure, conversion tables tend to differentiate between
types of energy useeg, will you be taking a train or a bus?but the more general point

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still holds: in these cases environmental phenomenawhether these be defined in terms of


climate change, or the damage done by fossil fuel extraction and emissionsare translated
into a branch of energy accounting. This is not to say that such versions of energy accounting
may not act back on and in environments. But it is clearly not an empirical environmental
entitythe emissions of power plants, the atmosphere, the climatethat is taken into account
here. Rather, what these accounting practices accomplish is to render energy more central to
economic, social, and bureaucratic processes: they confer value on energy generation and
use, as the site where societal, economic, and environmental change may converge. This is of
course in itself not a small accomplishment. However, if we approach these dynamics from
the standpoint of environmental studies, we must consider the implications for the relations
between various underdefined natures out there and the social practices in here.
It is not exactly a surprise, thennor is it inappropriatethat it is economic sociologists,
rather than environmental sociologists, who most prominently have turned carbon accounting
into their area of expertise. However, if it is not necessarily the specificity of environmental
problematics that guides the enactment of, and/or the studies of, environmental accounting,
where does this leave the environment? We then ask: what is involved in efforts to take the
environment into account through accounting devices and other social scientific methods and
techniques (such as, for instance, awareness; see our discussion of Gabrys work below)?
What modifications and transformations of environmental and social practices and entities
ensue? Posing these questions is to bring STS and environmental studies into relation around
a distinctive effort: to come up with an affirmative answer to the question may enable us to
attendrather than prevent us from doing thisto the specificity of environmental issues, as
distinct from but related to economic, social, political, and ethical ones. We too would like to
pay special attention to the role of social scientific methods in efforts to take the environmental
issues into account, but in doing so we would also like to open up the range of social methods
deemed relevant to these efforts. While most well-known social methods of environmental
change derive from social scientific disciplines like accounting and social psychology, we
explicitly also want to include in this social methods developed in other fields, most notably the
creative fields of art and design (see below).
Performativity and environmental change: what politics of methods?
In this theme issue we want to outline ways of reorienting the interrogation of the role of
social methods in environmental change, along two axes in particular: first, to pose the
insertion of environmental considerations and issues into social processes and practices
as a problem and, second, to open up the range of social methods and devices considered
relevant to the performance of environmental change. Indeed, we consider this second move
critical to begin addressing the aforementioned problem. In doing so, we take as our starting
point current debates on the politics of social methods, in social studies of science and
technology, economic sociology, environmental studies as well as in design, environmental
art, and social theory. We would like to briefly review some of these debates here, in order to
clarify why they are relevant to understanding environmental change, and vice versa, what is
intellectually interesting about environmental change as an empirical site for examining the
politics of social methods, broadly conceived.
As already mentioned, the performativity of scientific methods has been of long-standing
interest in STS, going back to the laboratory studies of the 1970s, which famously emphasized
the performative capacities of scientific instruments, according to which methods do not just
enable the observation, analysis, and description of phenomena, but help to strengthen their
reality (Knorr-Cetina, 1995; Latour and Woolgar, 1979). This proposition has in recent years
received special attention in economic sociology, where it has been deployed to contest the
conventional sociological critique of economics. Rather than saying that simplistic economic

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assumptions do not do justice to complex social reality, sociologists of the performativity


school proposed that the theory and methods of economics actively participate in the making
and remaking of social actors and formations. According to this argument, the methods of
economics, as well as the various sociotechnical devices involved, take part in the articulation
of the actors, actions, and arrangements, as well as the issues at stake.
In some respects, it is only a small step from the economic methods studied by economic
sociology to a broader range of social methods deemed relevant to the enactment of environmental
change. With the rise to prominence of carbon calculation as a principal modality of environmental
policy, in the European context, in both the profit and governmental sector, economics has
of course become a major source of models and expertise in relation to the environment. The
performativity thesis, implying that social science methods not only render existing objects and
issues measurable and describable, but take part in transforming and formatting social and material
realities, has directed attention to these methods and the settings in which they are employed, as
crucial topics for environmental studies. However, it is equally important to recognize that,
in relation to environmental change, the question of how methods organize, format, and enact
the phenomena they disclose for analysis implicates many different social disciplines besides
economics. Indeed, it seems to us that a broadening of the focus to include other social
methods, such as social psychology or ergonomics, may have significant consequences for
how we formulate, understand, and deploy the aforementioned performativity thesis.
When social psychologists are brought in to contribute to the design of sociotechnological
systems of behavioural change, say to configure devices for influencing energy behaviours
in sustainable social housing projects, their methods too may well acquire performative
capacities (Derksen etal, 2012; see also Marres, 2013). Similar questions can be posed
about the deployment of social science expertise to contribute to the organisation of public
and political processes of opinion-making and decision making in relation to environmental
issues, in the form of deliberative methods and models of stakeholder governance (Asdal
2008b; Blok, 2007). And what about designers and artists bringing in aesthetic skills,
sensibilities, and a spirit of adventure to devise experimental contraptions for environmental
awareness, like experimental smart toasters to be installed in peoples kitchens which
know when other people are having their toast (Braun, forthcoming; Michael, 2012)? On
what conditions could such knowledge and instruments qualify as social methods too?
To begin addressing such questions, this theme issue brings together empirical studies of
diverse social methods and their roles in the enactment of environmental change. It explores
the performativity of different social methods, from the organization of public consultation
events to the design of carbon budgeting procedures, and examines the particular claims,
aspirations, and effects associated with them as regards the performance of environmental
change. What is environmental change made to be through social methods? How are natureobjects and issues depicted and transformed?
We would then like to test the possible scope for adopting a more symmetrical understanding
of the relevance of different social science methods in relation to environmental change,
placing economics, political science, design, and art on a more equal footing, as far as their
social study is concerned. We would like to test what possibilites there are for redressing the
highly asymmetric situation in which economics and accounting methods have emerged as
the principal vehicles for the socialization of environmental change.
The many politics of social methods: from surveys to participation

Of course, there is nothing new in the fact that social science methods are deployed to further
societal change. The now common methods of social scientists, such as surveys and public
opinion polls, each have long histories, and the application and design of such methods to
further progressive ends feature more or less prominently in these histories (Tonkiss, 2004).

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Even sociologists who today are linked to grand theory were in their time eager to develop
methods for pursuing different forms of empirical social research. Ferdinand Tnnies, for
instance, best known for his double notion Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, spent a large
part of his professional life attempting to establish so-called sociographic observatories and
pursuing a method he called sociography. In trying (in vain) to argue for this approach,
Tnnies used Max Webers earlier efforts and notes as the legitimation. Max Weber himself
had tried to initiate newspaper and public opinion research as well as to use survey methods to
map the working conditions of the working class (Oberschall, 1965, pages109110).
Webers concern when wanting to use survey techniques in order to map the conditions
of the working class was not to liberate the workers, but to figure out whether the working
class was in solidarity with the state. Webers perspective, as that of many others, was a
state perspective. Which is also to say, our concern in this theme issue with the question
of how social methods assist in the enactment of social change was definitely not on his
agenda. However, to view the deployment of social methods in environmental change in
this historical context, however broadly sketched, does raise a question that authors in this
theme issue are concerned withthe question of which actors and which issues social
methods become attached to [see the contributions by Gran Sundqvist (2014) and by
Steve Hinchliffe, Les Levidow, and Sue Oreszczyn (2014)]. In the American and British
traditions, social research was much more closely linked not only to reform, but to what we
could call an activist agenda. Here, methods like the survey were applied by social workers,
philanthopists, public health workers, and charity workers who had social reform as their
primary objective, but who undertook the collection and publication of social data on slum
conditions to this end (Oberschall 1972; Savage, 2010; Turner, 2003). One could say, then,
that a certain performative politics has been implied in the deployment of social methods
from the very beginning: the portrayal of social settings and groups with the aid of survey
methods took part in the constitution of social problems.
At the same time, a link between social methods and activism and social change can
by no means be taken for granted. Indeed, in subsequent developments in social research,
methods like the social survey were explicitly stripped of their activist aura, and replaced
with the neutral frame of scientific method, in the promotion of focus groups, polling
methods, and so on. At the same time, methods like the focus group and the opinion poll
came to be celebrated precisely for their capacity to inform government (Osborne and Rose,
1999), and many of the methods that are deployed today to involve publics in environmental
issues implicitly or explicitly draw on these scientifically framed methods for capturing and
aggregating peoples views, preferences, and so on (Lezaun and Soneryd, 2007). Gran
Sundqvists (2014) contribution to this theme issue speaks in interesting ways to this topic
ofthe seemingly nonpolitical political capacities of social scientific methods in his study of
procedures for increasing public participation in technoscientific conflicts.
Investigating engagement with the issue of radioactive waste management in two different
geographical settings, Sundqvist outlines precisely the tension between a narrow conception
of methods as governance and a more open-ended politics of method: more precisely,
between procedures through which nuclear stakeholders try to frame public participation as
a means to achieve acceptance for an already-defined expert agenda versus procedures that
are not, from the outset oriented towards governance, and may be deployed towards activist
ends. However, as Sundqvist demonstrates, such efforts are fragile and may easily fail:
something which is linked also to the severe epistemic difficulties that arise in endeavours to
develop procedures that do not reinforce the division between nature (framed as phenomena
and problems to be addressed by experts) or the social (framed as issues that can be handled
by the public). Hence, as we have stressed above, hybridity is not always enacted in practice,

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but may, on the contrary, be carefully undone through the very procedures for participation
in environmental governance.
While our discussion here can only provide a very brief sketch of the issues, this short
overview should help to make clear that there are a lot of different politics to social methods.
Importantly, their political capacities do not only pertain to the latent, partly contradictory
capacities of nonpolitical scientific methods to intervene in government and mobilize publics
(sometimes called subpolitics). They are equally closely associated with progressive visions
of a politics of research that seeks to enable collective action upon issues by making and
spreading knowledge about them. It is this broad and in some ways diffuse range of politics
plural, which we take to be the horizon for the investigations presented in this theme issue:
several papers presented here explore efforts to reconnect the investigation of the politics of
methods in the subpolitical sense, with efforts to deploy social methods in the progressive
activist sense, including that by Steven Hinchliffe, Les Levidow, and Sue Oreszczyn (2014).
Their paper investigates the possibilities for deploying a performative understanding of the
politics of knowledge in the pursuit of progressive research practices and agendas. This
understanding, they propose, allows us to usefully add to existing research practices insofar
as they may open up a space for taking the environment and concerned actors into account
in more productive and enabling ways. Their contribution, then, explicitly sets out to explore
and experiment with research practices that stay close and are more attentive to those directly
affected and involved in the issues at hand, arguing that this also offers a more promising
approach to taking the environment into account.
Other contributions make deliberate moves to broaden the range of social methods
that may serve as environmental awareness devices. Jennifer Gabrys in her contribution
(2014) discusses how the challenge of making energy visible may be addressed through
a variety of material practices and contraptions, which seek to enable and enhance versions
of engagement as a precondition for any form of change. Hence the question she asks, and
that we might all ask, in relation to the politics of social methods and environmental change
is how energy, or the environment (or nature-objects) is being materialized or rematerialized
in practice. In contrast to many other contemporary accounts of the relation between social
science methods and the environment, which often rely heavily on the idiom of efficiency,
Gabry proposes another take on this altogether, suggesting the notions of hesitating practice
and speculative qualities as potentially more generative for environmental awareness.
Other contributions engage more directly with aforementioned work at the intersection
of economic sociology and STS. In some sense, this work offers an unavoidable exemplary
for studies of social methods and environmental change, as one of the key notions deployed
in this area is precisely that of market devices. This STS concept (borrowing and adapted
from Michel Foucault on the dispositif by Callon etal) then also reflects an empirical reality,
in that precisely devices designed to intervene and work upon markets have achieved a
dominant position in the area of environmental governance and change, not least in the form
of the carbon markets noted above. But we can and must nevertheless still ask: what exactly
is the relevance of such market devicesas analyzed in the social studies of financefor
the study of environmental issues? As we suggested, devices of environmental change may
call for new and possibly different analysis of the performativity of devices and methods. But
in what ways? Put more generally; what happens when not just market methods and devices,
but the analysis of the performativity of methods, shifts to other contexts and settings? The
question of how market devices take part in performing realities, or issues, becomes a
different question if the aim is to understand how social science methods participate in
performing change; and in particular rather diffuse, environmental forms of change.

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The objective in paying attention to a wide range of social science methods is certainly
not to establish a new hierarchy of methods once and for all: we do not believe that some
methods or some versions of expertise are essentially or necessarily qualitatively better at
taking the environment into account, or more caring in relation to the environmental issue,
than others. Our point is a different one: if we are to render social studies of science and
technology and environmental studies mutually relevant, the relevant problems to explore do
not only concern social methods, as such, but equally the environmental issues upon which
such methods operate and the settings through which they are made to act on environmental
phenomena such as behaviour, awareness, or performance. To our two previous arguments
(1) for a symmetrical valuation of social methods, and (2) a broadening of the range of social
devices and appoaches taking part in environmental changewe then add the environmental
specificity of methological inventionto the environmental specificity of interventions of
and by methods as our third point. In investigating this, we think it fruitful to draw not
only from the STS traditionwhich has been so important in rendering us sensitive to the
materiality and performativity of methodsbut equally from the literature that has sensitized
us to the ways in which objects are being modified and transformed as they move (by way of a
heterogeneous set of practices) from one context, setting, or practice to another (Barry, 2006).
The implication is that the specificity of the sites and settings for enacting environmental
change matter and their particular capacities for articulating environments as account-able
require further investigation.
The importance of the setting is underlined by Kristin Asdal in her (2014) contribution,
which is a study of a particular office, namely a Ministry of Finance. As Asdal demonstrates,
the environment may indeed be radically transformed as an issue moves from one context
to another; by way of accounting methods the climate issue can be, for example, transformed
into an oil issueas became the case within the setting of a Ministry of Finance. Hence,
in exploring the politics of social science methods, we must take care not to take the very
objectthat is, the environment, for granted. Moreover, she gives a particular formulation
to the general idea that methods are not neutral, proposing that there is a problematic at work
in the broad area of environmental change which Asdal designed as interested method:
methods for taking environments into account come with agendas built into them; they
frequently fail ostensibly and indeed do so remarkably often. This is an additional reason to
attend much more closely to the specificity of environmental issues.
It is clear, then, that we cannot simply extend the perspective on the devices of the market,
to the devices of the environment. Indeed, as one of us has proposed elsewhere, thevery
relations between economy, nature, society, and politics may be put at stake through the
deployment of social devices and methods of environmental change (Marres, 2011). When
studying the deployment of social methods in relation to environmental change, we then
have to examine what kinds of relations are being produced between different regimes or
ontologies, including those of science and society. In his contribution to this issue, Anders
Blok (2014) addresses precisely this topic, but with a twist, as he refuses to take as given
that there are essential differences between the ways in which various social sciences, such
as economics and anthropology, formulate the project of environmental change. Blok argues
that we too readily accept that economics is a universalizing and globalizing practice, whereas
anthropology localizes. In an effort to undo this schema, his paper seeks to demonstrate how
economics as well as anthropology work by way of both globalizing and localizing moves.
Taking this comparison further, Blok alerts us to the fact that in enabling such moves, both
economics and anthropology offer crucial social methods for taking nature into account, and
we might add, for doing environmental issues.

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Kristin Asdal
Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Noortje Marres
Goldsmiths, University of London
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